Meeting with the first priests

February 22nd, 1932    St. Josemaria meets for the first time with a group of priests to whom he explains the Work and they decide to help him. He writes in his ‘Catalinas’: “Last Monday we met for the first time with five priests. We will continue to meet: on a weekly basis, to get acquainted. To all of them I gave one out of five meditations on our vocation”. 

St. Josemaria used to call these meetings ‘Monday conferences’. Bl. Alvaro said on the 7/7/76 in a get together: “When our father saw what God wanted from him, he immediately put his means: prayer, mortification, and started to look for young people. As he was a very young priest, he also tried to meet priests that could help him - looking after confessions for the vocations that were appearing - and even to receive a vocation to Opus Dei. He got to gather some eight or ten. One of them had a bit of a difficult character (...), because he always wanted to be lecturing, which our father would receive with humility, although afterwards, naturally, as a founder he knew well what he was meant to do. He would invite that priest every Wednesday, so that he would spend the day at home, and he would treat the priest as if he was St. Joseph. We didn’t have any money, but him we would pick up in a car: he would eat at home, he would spend hours giving advice, and after he would be sent back home in a taxi (...). To us laypeople, back then quite young, was very hard to get along with him. Those priests wanted to make some sort of commitment of obedience to the father, but except for some marvellous exception, they immediately started to disobey. They wanted, deep inside, to leave our father on the side, and to take care of everything themselves: one of the financial issues, another the intellectual formation; another the spiritual direction… our father, as far as he could, bore that with a lot of cheerfulness, but the moment came when he saw clearly that he had to do without them, and distanced himself from them, with a lot of tact, with charity, so much so that they were all left quite happy”.